Ulrich Zwingli’s Travels
From an Alpine village in the Toggenburg to the schools of Basel, Bern, and Vienna, the parishes of Glarus and Einsiedeln, the pulpit of Zurich, and the field of Kappel. Follow 22 moments in Zwingli’s life, 1484–1531, and explore what the evidence does—and does not—tell us.
Confidence describes the location or episode, not every date or street address. Date ranges overlap; visits and events within a longer residence are numbered separately.
Select a number to read its story. Hover or focus for a label. On small screens, swipe the map sideways; selecting a stop brings it into view.
Reading the map: numbered callouts point to approximate locations. Lines show chronological connections, not verified travel routes; dashed lines involve probable stops. Repeat visits share an anchor. Marburg and Vienna lie beyond the frame and are shown in insets. The illustrated base map is schematic, and its city symbols are placed for legibility rather than survey accuracy.
The chronological itinerary
Follow the numbered stops, or select any heading to locate it on the map.
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01Wildhaus · the Toggenburg
Born a few weeks after Luther
Ulrich (or Huldrych) Zwingli was born in the mountain village of Wildhaus, where his father was a shepherd of substance and the village bailiff. His mother taught her children the stories of the Bible.
Sources: Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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02Weesen
First lessons with his uncle
The boy was sent to his uncle Bartholomew Zwingli, dean at Weesen on the Walensee, who taught him the rudiments and saw that he was meant for learning.
Sources: Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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03Basel · St. Theodore’s school
Latin, logic, and disputation
At about ten Zwingli went to school at Basel, where he learned Latin and excelled in the disputations that were the sport of the schools.
Sources: Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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04Bern · Heinrich Wölflin
The classics under a humanist
At Bern Zwingli studied the Latin poets under the humanist Heinrich Wölflin. The Dominicans tried to draw the musical boy into their order, and his family moved him away.
Sources: Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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05Vienna · the university
Philosophy at a great university
Zwingli continued his studies at the University of Vienna, where he read philosophy, astronomy, and physics and finished his Latin education in the ancient classics.
Documentation: The Vienna matriculation register records him in 1498. A notation suggests he was excluded for a time and re-entered in 1500, so his residence may not have been continuous.
Sources: Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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06Basel · the university
Thomas Wyttenbach
Returning to Basel, Zwingli taught in a school while completing his degrees, taking the master’s in 1506. In 1505 Thomas Wyttenbach came to lecture and taught that the death of Christ is the sole price of forgiveness and that indulgences are a delusion. Zwingli always reckoned him the man who first unsettled his convictions.
Sources: Beza’s Icones · George · Zwingli Timeline.
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07Constance · ordination
Made a priest
Zwingli was ordained at Constance, in whose diocese Zurich and much of eastern Switzerland lay.
Sources: Zwingli Timeline · Grob.
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08Wildhaus · first Mass
A first Mass at home
He sang his first Mass in his home village before taking up his parish.
Sources: Zwingli Timeline.
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09Glarus
Ten years as parish priest
At Glarus Zwingli read widely in the classics and the Fathers and in 1513 set himself to learn Greek, that he might draw the teaching of Christ from the fountains themselves. He copied out the Pauline epistles by hand.
Sources: Beza’s Icones · Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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10Lombardy · Novara and Marignano
Chaplain to the mercenaries
Glarus hired out its young men to foreign armies, and Zwingli went with them as chaplain on the Italian campaigns. The slaughter of the Swiss at Marignano on September 13–14, 1515 turned him against the mercenary trade for the rest of his life.
Documentation: His service as chaplain on the campaigns is attested; whether he was on the field at Marignano itself is less certain. The marker represents the Lombard campaigns.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Beza’s Icones · Zwingli Timeline.
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11Basel · Erasmus
The Greek New Testament
Erasmus was at Basel seeing his Greek New Testament through Froben’s press. Zwingli made the journey to meet him and came away with a copy of the Novum Instrumentum and the conviction that the church must be rebuilt on Scripture in the original tongues.
Documentation: The timeline’s staging sheet dates the meeting to 1514, when Erasmus first arrived in Basel; the published timeline gives spring 1516.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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12Einsiedeln
Preaching Christ to pilgrims
Zwingli became people’s priest at the shrine of the Black Madonna, which drew pilgrims from across Europe on the promise of full remission of sins. He told them that Christ alone forgives and that God is no nearer at Einsiedeln than anywhere else. Here he committed much of the New Testament to memory in Greek.
Documentation: The timeline gives April 1516 for the move; other accounts give the autumn of that year.
Sources: Beza’s Icones · Grob · Zwingli Timeline.
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13Zurich · the Grossmünster
Preaching through Matthew
On his thirty-fifth birthday Zwingli began as people’s priest at the Grossmünster. He set aside the lectionary to preach straight through Matthew: “The life of Jesus has been too long hidden from the people.” Many went home saying, “We never heard anything like this.”
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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14Zurich · the plague
Brought to the verge of the grave
Plague killed perhaps a quarter of Zurich. Zwingli visited the sick daily until he was struck down himself in September. In his sickness he wrote three hymns of submission to the will of God.
Sources: Grob · George · Zwingli Timeline.
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15Zurich · sausages in Lent
Scripture against the fast
When the printer Christoph Froschauer and his friends ate sausages in Lent, Zwingli found no warrant in Scripture for the ban and defended their liberty in his pamphlet On the Choice and Freedom of Foods.
Sources: Zwingli Timeline.
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16Zurich · First Disputation
The Sixty-Seven Articles
Some six hundred gathered in the town hall. Zwingli offered to defend every one of his sixty-seven articles from the Bible alone, and the council ordered that every preacher in the canton preach nothing but what could be proved from Scripture.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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17Zurich · reforming the city
Images, marriage, the Supper, and the Prophezei
The Second Disputation in October 1523 debated images and the Mass. On April 2, 1524 Zwingli publicly married Anna Reinhard, and that June the images were removed from the churches. In Holy Week 1525 the Mass gave way to a simple Lord’s Supper, and that June the Prophezei began its daily public study of the Hebrew and Greek text.
When Johann Eck disputed against the Zurich reform at Baden in 1526, Zwingli did not attend, judging he would not be safe there.
Documentation: The timeline dates the Prophezei to June 1526 in its date column but June 1525 in its text; June 1525 is the usual date.
Sources: George · Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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18Bern · the Disputation
The decisive victory
Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bucer, and Capito argued the evangelical case for three weeks. Bern, the most powerful canton, enacted the Reformation by edict on February 7, 1528.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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19Kappel · the First War
A peace without a battle
Zurich and the Five Inner Cantons faced each other at Kappel, but the war ended without a battle. The soldiers of both sides are said to have shared a pot of milk soup across the border. The peace lasted two years.
Documentation: The milk-soup story is a cherished tradition rather than a documented event.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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20Marburg · the colloquy
Agreement on fourteen articles
Philip of Hesse brought Zwingli and Luther together to unite the evangelicals against the emperor. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and parted on the bodily presence of Christ in the Supper. It is the only time the two men are known to have met.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Zwingli Timeline.
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21Zurich · the Zurich Bible
The first complete Protestant Bible
The Prophezei produced the complete Zurich Bible, printed by Froschauer in 1531, three years before Luther’s complete German Bible.
Sources: Zwingli Timeline.
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22Kappel · Zwingli’s death
“They can indeed kill the body”
The Five Cantons marched on Zurich, and fewer than a thousand Zurich men met some seven thousand at Kappel. Zwingli rode with them as chaplain. Stooping to comfort a dying man, he was struck down. Merle d’Aubigné records his words: “They can indeed kill the body, but they cannot kill the soul!” Found alive after the battle and refusing a priest, he was killed, and his body was quartered and burned.
He was forty-seven. A stone marks the place where he fell.
Sources: Merle d’Aubigné · Beza’s Icones · Zwingli Timeline.
Sources
The early years of Zwingli’s life are known chiefly from his first biographers and from university and church records; the Zurich years are richly documented. Each entry identifies the accounts behind its reconstruction.
- J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century. Narrative history of the Swiss Reformation; Marignano, Erasmus’s poem, the first Zurich sermons, the disputations, Marburg, and Kappel.
- Jean Grob, The Life of Ulric Zwingli. Nineteenth-century biography; the schools, Glarus, Einsiedeln, and the plague hymn as preserved by Bullinger.
- C. G. M’Crie, ed., Beza’s “Icones”: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters. The editor’s sketch of Zwingli; Wyttenbach, Glarus, Einsiedeln, the indulgence seller, and the stone at Kappel.
- Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers. On Wyttenbach, the plague, the removal of images, and the abolition of the Mass.
- Reformation Stewards, Ulrich Zwingli Timeline. The site’s own chronology, on which these stops are built.